Terrible, terrible. Honestly, on it goes and I have to remember to never think it can't get any worse because fate, the fucker, only takes that as a challenge. Well, I say that but I subscribe to no theories about how things work, what they mean, other than the theory that none of us know. Some people say everything happens for a reason, which always pisses me off - it always seems backwards - everything has consequences is more like it, though maybe not everything does, maybe some events pass without leaving a trace of effect on anyone or anything. Doesn't seem likely.

I am quite stoned and quite shocked and totally exhausted. Before we got the diagnosis of kidney stones and a blockage in one kidney causing mayhem, I thought ED was experiencing the next decline due to MS and although no one could understand why her stomach was bloated up as round and as hard as if she was six months pregnant, it never occurred to me where we were finding ourselves. It was mainly me and Son, who arrived at the care home together on Saturday afternoon and were spat out of A&E into a grey predawn at at 5.30 on Sunday morning. We had hours of waiting, anxiously huddled together in our cubicle, ED, me, Son and the manager of the Care home, N, who is not maintaining any kind of professional distance, but has fallen right into caring for my girl, behind the green pleated curtains, eavesdropping on other people's emergencies, trying not to think about anything at all. All the tests and X-rays came back (eventually, one at a time) with information that didn't help, didn't point anywhere specific, until she had a CT scan at some ungodly hour, and suddenly they'd got it, there it was, her kidneys. Fucked. It was a relief to have such a clearly defined cause, especially one unrelated to MS, that could happen to anyone, but all too soon words and phrases like 'end of life event' 'unlikely' and 'serious' were being bandied about and where I'd been on my way to some kind of acceptance that it was her time when I thought it was the inexorable MS, making her feel so bad and I knew I didn't want her to just live in pain and confusion, but suddenly it was non-MS, possibly curable, but, they were saying, unlikely to be survivable by ED for reasons I don't have a clear grasp of, but to do with the massive amount of infection, her MS-lowered immune system, her general weakness and the likelihood of the infection bursting out of her kidneys into the rest of her system, leading to an 'end of life event' (cunts). And suddenly we could lose her at the age of 38, not from fucking MS which has eaten her life, but from some other fucking fucking thing.

If they did nothing she wouldn't survive. If they disturbed the kidney stones (I think this is what they said), she wouldn't survive because of the infection spreading. They needed to drain the pus out of her system - I still don't understand exactly what was containing whatever it was that had blown up her belly (was it in her kidney? I don't really care that I don't know) - but this operation would either be simple and take ten minutes or could take hours and then not be successful and the latter was most likely.

And we gathered round her bed in the pre-op place, me, Grandson, YD, Son and Bloke, dazed and heart-broken, then were kind of directed to the canteen to wait, where Son and YD's coping strategies drove them both to scoff vast quantities of nasty food-like substances, GS became locked into his phone, I held myself together with my bare hands and Bloke chatted on as if this was just another morning get together, making me want to kill him.

And she made it, and she's still going, her stats creeping in the right direction - she smiled broadly this morning, though she was absent again this afternoon.

I don't want to go to bed because then I'll go to sleep and then it will be morning and who knows what will happen tomorrow. Right now I'm the only one awake, the cat has taken herself off somewhere and my girl is being watched over by hawk-eyed nurses who know their shit. No one can see my face.

But it's half one, and I have missed a night's sleep so I'm off.

I am grateful for the NHS, fuck me am I grateful for them.